The Divison

Community Q&A: Snowdrop

Greetings Division agents!

It’s been a few days since we’ve showed off our Snowdrop engine trailer at VGX. We’ve received a lot of love and questions from you guys and we want you to know we really appreciate it. It’s amazing to see that for some of you this is the first true next-gen experience. We picked up some of your most asked questions and here are our answers. Enjoy!

What makes Snowdrop so unique?

We saw how you were excited by things such as the “closing car door” of the E3 demo. Small details like this make you feel more immersed in the game universe. It is exactly what we had envisioned for The Division.

The lighting system, inspired by film production techniques, is one of the powerful features that will enhance the players’ experience. It captures light realistically, which means that any change in the game environment will have an impact on the lighting. The great thing is that this applies not just to the indoor and outdoor lighting, but to the time of day as well. Can a chaotic city be even more dangerous at night? :)

It is easy to imagine the possibilities a realistic lighting and particle system can add to the game experience... Furthermore, thanks to Snowdrop’s shaders system, the environmental surfaces will change as the weather changes during gameplay. As you see, snow eventually melts. ;)

Snowdrop does a great job at taking the realism of the environment to a whole new level while still providing a thrilling game experience. The building tech for instance allows us to create a very detailed and realistic city at a large scale. New York City is so diverse and we want you to feel completely immersed in this huge, detailed "world".

To sum up, we really want to create a detailed, stunning, diversified and immersive world that reacts to your actions. So, be prepared and remember that you are in the city that never sleeps, not even during a pandemic!

How is the destruction system going to be?

We always wanted to have a high quality destruction system. But the truth is that thanks to Snowdrop, we ended up with the most realistic destruction system to date. We created a visceral and accurate destruction experience using procedural techniques; it reacts differently depending on the physical forces at play. For example, when glass shatters or wood splinters, it will mimic reality like you've never seen before.

You said that The Division has been designed with next-gen consoles in mind. How it is going to look on PC?

As you know, Massive has its roots in PC development. We are working hard and we want to make sure that we have a very high quality experience on PC. You can be sure that our PC version won’t be a port, but a full-fledged, optimized version! We want to create the best game possible regardless of what platform you play on.